Jared Diamond’s work deals with how man’s intrusion in the environment caused some past civilizations to fall into ruin that used to be flourishing and the impending collapse of today’s societies. The book intends to remind its readers to learn from history to minimize the potential for catastrophic failure both in the developing and developed countries. Diamond relies on five assumptions when he discusses the collapse of societies: societies fail to survive if they damage their environment, if they are adversely affected by climate change, if they have hostile neighbors, if their support by trade partners declines, and if they fail to respond to its environmental problems. The last one is decisive to all failures. Failures may be on the form of: failure to anticipate or to perceive a problem, failure to attempt to solve it, and failure to succeed in problem-solving.
The idea of “collapse” is initially tracked through a number of historical case studies which include the failed Polynesian cultures on Easter Island and in the southwest Pacific, the Anasazi and Mayan civilizations in the Americas, and the Viking colony on Greenland Norse. Besides attributing collapse to deforestation, resource exhaustion, climate changes, wars, Diamond includes in his analysis on the causality of the collapse of ancient societies the link between the environment and culture (e.g. Norse colony on Greenland). For him, societies’ cultural values can be catastrophic in the decision-making and can impede adaptation, thereby leading to extermination. By contrast, the New Guinea Highlands, Tikopia, and Japan during the Tokugawa period provide examples of premodern societies that avoided collapse and achieved environmental sustainability.
The next part is devoted to modern societies: the cases of Rwanda, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, in contrast to the cases of China and Australia. The chapter on Rwanda focuses on the genocide of 1994 and offers an example of what can happen to a poorly governed society that is unable to resolve its population and environmental challenges. The chapter on Haiti and Dominican Republic examines a case where two distinct cultures and political entities, coexisting on the same place and facing similar environmental challenges, achieve different outcomes. Haiti’s future remains unpromising, whereas the Dominican Republic’s future is relatively promising.
Today’s rapid advancement of technology and information, the expansion of modernization, and the deepening globalization are producing its own contradictions – increasing deforestation and habitat destruction, disappearance of tropical rainforests, soil erosion, salinization, introduction of harmful species, etc. Diamond also notes other categories that add to the concern: global climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in food, soil, and water; exhaustion of energy reserves; and full utilization of the earth’s photosynthetic capacity. And compounded with issues such as full utilization of the world’s fresh water supplies, overhunting and overfishing, the ballooning of population and the increased per capita impact of people, according to Diamond, the earth’s capacity in the coming decades may likely not be able to sustain the next generation.
Diamond neither discusses the limitations of global markets nor problematizes the question of capital accumulation by big corporations. In fact, he asserts that the dilemma can be overcome by privatizing resources and giving owners a long-term perspective. For him, big businesses are not at all bad; without them, the environment cannot be saved. Economy, which he notes with little importance, will explain many of the reasons people conduct themselves wastefully these days.
Diamond’s assumption in formulating his analyses for the contemporary society is the same as the supposition of the Third Way theoreticians such as Giddens: that we are now living in a “risk society”. The perceived consequences brought by environmental degradation are such examples of risks to which Giddens’s theory refers. One crucial feature is that these new threats are “manufactured risks”, meaning, they result from economic, technological and scientific interventions into nature, which disrupt natural processes that it is no longer possible to avoid the responsibility by letting nature itself find way to establish again its lost balance.
Today’s notions of ecological threat – from global warming, the hole in the ozone layer, to the accumulation of toxic chemicals in the food we eat – are, for the most part, directly invisible and undetectable without the diagnostic tools of science. They are, in fact, “low probability-high consequence” risks, meaning, no one knows how great the risks are; the probability of the global catastrophe is relatively small; however, if the catastrophe occur, it will really be terminal. Thus, they are not external risks like a huge comet falling on Earth but the unforeseen outcome of individuals’ technological endeavour to increase their productivity.
How are these environmental risks approach the reality of capitalism? The notion of “risk” indicates a precise domain in which these threats are generated: the domain of uncontrolled use of science and technology in the conditions of capitalism. The sample case of “risk” is that of a new technological invention put to use by private corporation without public democratic debate and control, then generating the threat of unforeseen catastrophic consequences. Is not this kind of risk rooted in the fact that the logic of market is driving private corporations to use technological innovations and simply expand their production without taking account of the effects of such activity on the environment, as well as the health of people itself?
The conclusion that can be drawn in the present global situation, in which private corporations outside public control are making decisions which can affect us all, is that the solution lies in a kind of socialization of the productive process. In this kind of society, global decisions about how to develop and use productive capacities at the disposal of society would somehow be made by the entire people affected by such decisions.
